This Week I Ate... Honey & Co, Morito and an Ambassador's Des Res

Once again - and because I'm a sentient human being I deserve it - I ordered a Fitzrovia Bun at Milk & Honey on Warren Street.

This is something you should try to do at least once in your life. I do it about twice a year. Any more would seem greedy.

It is like no other bun you will ever feast your eyes on. Sure it's sticky, of course it's fluffy - and a little harder in all the right places - it's honey sweet, a pistachio nuttiness gives it some added colour and crunch. And the sum of all these parts is the answer to anyone who might ever look at you and wonder whether baking is worth it.

If you were trying to explain to an alien what the meaning of life was, and whether it was all worth it, this bun should be added to your armoury - provided it's an alien with taste buds.

We do all this, you can say, pointing out beautiful buildings, works of art, new born babies, music, love, TV shows like Bullseye and these buns here.

The problem of course is that having tasted the bun the alien will decide to settle and then colonise our planet. So on second thoughts do not share these buns with aliens. Actually don't share them with anyone. Gobble one up with some black coffee at Honey & Co, where the staff are as breezy, sweet and enthusiastic as you could wish for at breakfast. I also had a sausage roll - great, soft, buttery pastry and a spicy sausage which I dipped in some deep red harissa sauce.

Here was the sort of food I love, a far cry from the tasting menu frenzy of last week. As was lunch at Morito, which was opened a few years ago on Exmouth Market by Sam and Sam Clark, a few doors down from Moro.

Morito is casual, not so comfy, grungy, street-foody and wonderful. It's a tapas bar, all bright orange bar, wooden floors, strip-lighting, exposed extraction type stuff. The little plates arrive in little browny/red earthenware dishes. Each dish, beautifully conceived, pretty and moreish. And unlike the froth, smears and foams of Michelin-aspiring cappuccino-bilge-serving establishments we should all escape from, I loved every bite and can remember each dish.

Just imagine these sort of things piling out of a kitchen and landing on a wooden table near you, alongside thin, buttery breads: chopped up tiny stringy bits of lamb, spiced and served on top of aubergine with yoghurt and pinenuts - a dish worth every moment of grass-munching meat-enhancing life lived by the sheep. Or tender chunks of octopus on top of saffron potatoes, or crispy prawns; every last tentacle guzzled whole.

There had also been a nifty, pungent - harsh almost, heart-starting perhaps - starter called a gilda. This was a pickled chilli on a stick, so-called because its Basque inventor named it after a movie starring Rita Hayworth because the shape of this curly plant reminded him of the actress.

I got his point. It's a sort of noon flavour that awakens a need for sherry.

Next time I have a party I want this food and as the two Clarks are publishing a book with all the recipes, that could be a goer.

This week I also wolfed down canapés at a party at the US Ambassador's residence in Regent's Park, where there was no Ferrero Rocher but plenty of food celebrating the ingredients of California, which is a nifty idea, especially when Californian wine is used to enforce the argument.

And if you think policemen are getting younger, Ambassador Barzun and his wife will have you reaching for your walking stick. They are as youthful and charming as the Chinese wallpaper in the drawing is pistachio-coloured. That's right, very.

I then hot-footed it (to unleash a second speech) to a group of 200 farmers at Whittlebury Hall in Northamptonshire. The dinner was the annual thank you by those who hunt over the farmers' land. The wives all cooked up beef stew and apple crumble (the latter crunchy and filled with brown sugar with apples whose slices had kept their form and weren't too mushy and that had just the right ratio of crumble to apple - ie lots more crumble; one should only ever endure so much fruit) and then I told what I reckon is one the funniest jokes of all time (available to Huff Post readers on special request).